Language separation and stable syntactic knowledge: verbs and verb phrases in bilingual children’s narratives

• Published in: Journal of portuguese linguistics Vol. 5; no. 1; pp. 1 - 30
• Main Authors: Flores, Cristina, Rinke, Esther, Torregrossa, Jacopo, Weingärtner, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 13-10-2022
• Subjects: bilingual children; German; Humanidades; Línguas e Literaturas; Portuguese; Reduzir as desigualdades; verb morphology; verb phrase; word order
• ISSN: 2397-5563; 2397-5563
• DOI: 10.16995/jpl.8043

The present study analyses written narratives of 60 Portuguese-German bilingual children between 8 and 15 years living in Switzerland, in both their languages. Portuguese is the children’s heritage language (HL) and German the environmental language. The analysis focusses on the children’s lexical, morphological and structural knowledge in the verb domain (verb types, agreement morphology, verbal tense, word order within the VP, orthography) and aims to determine the role of language dominance, general proficiency, current age and age of onset of bilingualism (AoO) in bilingual language acquisition at later stages of development (i.e., at school-age). The results show that the bilingual children display stable syntactic and morphological knowledge in both their languages. Lexical knowledge is positively correlated with age and proficiency. Morphological and syntactic deviations are residual in both languages and not correlated with AoO. No effects of cross-linguistic influence are observed. We only find performance differences between the Portuguese and the German corpus at the level of orthography. We conclude that in the analysed age span children have received enough exposure to both languages to develop stable morphological and syntactic knowledge, at least in the verb domain.
We would like to thank Dr. Maria de Lurdes Santos Gonçalves for coordinating the data collection in Switzerland and the teachers of the Camões, Institute of Cooperation and Language, I.P. for helping us collecting them. We are grateful to all the children and to their parents for participating in the study. Finally, we thank the editors of the Issue ‘Empirical Approaches to Portuguese Linguistics - New insights from studies in various areas of grammar’ and the reviewers for their constructive comments on previous versions of the paper.